After playing tourist for a couple of days in Moscow, we were driven about 250 km. north-east of Moscow to the city of Yaroslavl. It appeared more attractive than Moscow and full of the look of things ancient – over 1000 years old. Yasik has very old blood in his veins.
Although we had been driving for several hours, we stopped at a variety of offices before heading to the orphanage. In each office, we were left to wait while our facilitator conducted the business required. Our only contribution was to offer the gifts we had brought from Canada to whomever was handling the issue at hand, basically the removal of Yasik from the files of Russia. Otherwise, we sat to the side while each transaction took place. In one office where we waited in the outer office on wooden benches while the interpreter talked to the staff in an inner office, we watched an inch worm work its way across the floor. Dave tried to help the little thing and it freaked in terror.
Once we had visited several registries to begin the process of removing Yasik’s Russian footprint, our driver turned the van in the direction of the orphanage for our introduction to our son-to-be. Perhaps knowing her time with us was limited, the interpreter, Elvira, suggested we use this short drive to write down questions we might have for the orphanage staff. That turned out to be a bit useless. When I pulled out my questions later, I got blank but respectful stares. I would have loved to know why. We wanted a child—but did not fully understand the system that made that possible.
While I was naively writing down some questions, Elvira, a school teacher possibly conversant in several different languages, came up with an even better way to use five or ten minutes. She began to teach us some phrases she thought would be helpful in communicating with Yasik. Monolingual Dave started mimicking her without hesitation. I have worked in a couple of foreign languages and know how demanding language learning can be. I wanted to throw up. I was minutes from one of the best moments of my life. I doubt I could have found the focus had she suggested learning some parenting words in English, let alone to memorize words in Russian. If books written to guide people through the adoption process are merely suggesting adopters, already highly primed to prove how perfect they will be as parents, learn a few tourist-level phrases before travelling to the designated country, I get it. But some adoption guide books sound like they are suggesting adopters learn their child-to-be’s language by ordering an app from Amazon. Do they have any idea what that means? It is doubtful though even they would dare to suggest language learning be all wrapped in those few minutes before adoptive parents meet their child. I thank Yasik for learning English so quickly.
And here I go again. It is now 2026 and I am reading Sara Nović’s book, Mother Tongue[i]. Just yesterday I added a piece you’ll see below from her book, and now in my one-last-read before putting the post out there, I know I have to add another of the points made in her book. She speaks to parents of deaf children who are unable to communicate with their children via ASL signing leaving the child to grow up in a world without the attachment dialogue with parents develops. Yes, Yasik learned English quickly and stats suggest most transnational adoptees do so quickly, but what precious attachment opportunities are lost in that time in-between.
‘Social Orphans’
The amazing expectations of those few minutes did not end there. Elvira also managed to tuck in some information about Yasik’s history. Yasik’s mother visited him in the hospital where he lived for the first two years but “she moved around a lot”, whatever that meant. I did not question the comment at the time. Did Elvira expect a show of concern or some awareness of that oblique FYI? Now I wonder if my blasé reaction was because my mind was pre-set to an assumption against this mother’s care of her children. I have since learned much more about how many Russians saw adoption. I have read parents left their children at a state-run orphanage or what was also called a boarding school while they attended to commitments like education or work away from home. One source[ii] I did manage to secure writes of how the Soviets in the early years of their regime decided the raising of children would best be done by the state. In time the costs to the state led to backtracking, rather like the loop of the 150 years preceding the Soviet period.[iii]Nonetheless leaving a child in state care remained a more acceptable option than would have been true in other cultures. If Yasik’s mother “moved around a lot” then state care may have been an obvious choice not only for someone struggling with drugs or alcohol but perhaps someone struggling with other pressures of poverty. Yasik was, after all, born in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I have no journal entries referring to the role of the father in Yasik’s life because it appears no one told us anything about him. Was this because they knew little about him at that point or was his parenting too shameful to talk about? In post-Soviet Russia, 70% of Russian children lived in households where needs exceeded income.[iv] These children were so commonly raised by never-married, single mothers that the mothers were a labelled demographic, ‘Lone Mothers’. (When we later learned of Yasik’s sister, we also were sent papers that showed Yasik did have a bio-father present in his first year of life.)
A mother who moved around a lot and a father who was not considered worth consideration left Yasik in need of state care, but under the designation, ‘social orphan’. Things changed dramatically a few years later as adoption got dragged into Russian-American politics, but this was the environment in which we were adopting. Children who had either been dropped off or placed in care were designated ‘social orphans’ when they had living biological parents who had the right to return for their children. We cannot simply assume a child in state care arrived there because someone else was willfully negligent or no longer living. Adoption was not on the table if Russians had just dropped kids off at the boarding school-cum-orphanage while other issues are being worked out. Numbers from 70% to 90% are offered to account for ‘social orphans’ in the state system at the time. Yasik was a ‘social orphan’.
While I walk our dog, Brodie, on the Log Train trail I listen to books. Listening to From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle[v], about when he and his brothers were taken from their addicted father by Children’s Aid Society, I am struck by some similarities with the time he spent there in early childhood. As the brothers settle into fairly institutional care, clean and providing regular meals, the oldest brother explains to other kids residing there that their “‘dad was away and that we’d be going home as soon as the police found him. “I used to think that, too,” one kid said. “But we’re orphans now – don’t cha know?” I didn’t know what that meant”‘. A few weeks later a foster home that would take all three Thistle siblings was found. They were told they were lucky. Wouldn’t this too be a Canadian version of ‘social orphan’ with a family somewhere, government intervention and children confused and frightened.
However, as we later found out, while Yasik would have been labelled a ‘social orphan’ with living family, a copy of the court papers given to Yasik’s sister and adoptive family show that about the time we began to look for child, the state took away Yasik’s biological parents’ rights. Yasik was no longer boarding at the orphanage while his parents were working away from home. He was in process of becoming available for adoption, presumably because the court case was by then being considered.
Illegal adoptions, exploitation and The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption
However, at the time of our adoption, Dave and I were given no assurances that the parents had either relinquished or had their rights removed. So it was that when I came across articles of illegal adoptions a few years later, I did worry. I read that a number of Russian adoptions involved illegally obtained children, lacking parental surrender. I googled this issue and found articles that say, yes, Russia is as haunted by trafficking in children as are many other countries. Russia’s response is not to turn a blind eye.
Even though domestic adoptions are not highly sought after, there is distaste for the idea that Russians are being taken from Mother Russia. But above all, we are ultimately talking about human beings with as much love as any the world around, despite the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances. In fact, “In 2008, an amendment to the Russian law on human trafficking re-established that the activity of buying and/or selling a person constituted trafficking regardless of whether it was done for an exploitative purpose.”[vi]
Another article stretched the spectrum of ‘exploitation’ suggested by the word ‘regardless’. This article questioned the money laid out by people from wealthier countries in the quest of adopting a child even for the most wonderful of reasons, family making. This money alone likely outweighed the cost of raising that child in his or her social setting. Does this constitute “regardless of whether it was done for exploitative purpose”?
LUMOS and other organizations like Human Rights Watch make the contention that orphanages can be big business. Whether fronted as a zealous, even sincere, ‘high calling’ to rescue a needy child, adoption too can be big business.[vii] Either way the desire to help solve a problem can sometimes be turned by others into something hurtful to society. It is an aspect of adoption I only wanted to turn away from as too sickening to contemplate. An essential paradox?
Perhaps, but it is important to me to add to this post mention of two books that have come out since I originally wrote this post. One is A Flower Traveled In My Blood: the incredible true story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children[viii]. It is a part of the story of adoption than cannot be ignored. The other is the book I add reference to above, Mother Tongue: a memoir,[ix] which I chose to read because of the adoption story embedded in an overall message concerning disability. Several of the chapters speak directly to the side of adoption that does not get included in the ‘honeymoon’ period memoirs. The chapters, ‘You Before Me’ and ‘Mother Tongue’ target the adoption debate but each chapter in this book is worth spending time weighing for its excellent consideration of an essential paradox. On one page the reader encounters a single word sentence, “Except” turning the reader from the urgency for adoptions, to, at the very least, questionable aspects of particularly the adoptions of ‘social orphans’. Six pages on a paragraph begins with “But still…”.
And so it was that Yasik became eligible for adoption at the age of 4 in a society that did not easily embrace domestic adoptions and a government enticed by the money attached to foreign adoptions. These ‘on the one hand’ but then ‘on the other hand’ considerations demand that we recognize, despite the possibility of a better financial return for a child’s care through international adoption in this society can always be found people with heart. 75% of adoptions were domestic in the early 2000s, and somewhere I cannot locate at this writing, I saw the same breakdown for the year 1997. As noted above, Russians, for all the writing about their antipathy to domestic adoption because they do not want a child not of family blood, did process far more domestic adoptions than international at that time.[x]
Which leaves us with one more conflict between a simple family-making desire and the taint of exploitation. Yasik came close to being included in these stats and another wrinkle in our adoption process. A short time before we left for Russia, we were given the heads up that a Russian family or two were considering adopting Yasik and that another packet of money would secure our position in first place. We laid the money down immediately. This is not a unique aspect of international adoption.[xi]
It remains to be said, thankfully, in our particular adoption, whether we were on our game or not, our adoption agency was doing due diligence. They were adhering to The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption which came into force in Canada on April 1, 1997. As the Fact Sheet handout given to us says, “The convention is an international law created to prevent abuses from occurring in intercountry adoptions“. The Fact Sheet does go on to say, “The adoptive family is responsible to ensure that the child they plan to adopt is legally free for adoption and that all legal requirements of both countries have been met, including adoption consents, validity of adoption order and immigration requirements”. Ooh, I might admit that I don’t remember doing that sort of due diligence personally.
Footnotes
[i] Nović, Sara Mother Tongue: a memoir Random House, 2026, 23, 24
[ii] McKinney, J.R. Russian Babies, Russian Babes: Economic and Demographic Implications of International Adoption and International Trafficking for Russia (Some might access it at this address March 2009Demokratizatsiya The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 17(1):19-40 DOI:10.3200/DEMO.17.1.19-40)
[iii] Ransel, David L. Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia Princeton U.P., 1990
[iv] McKinney, J.R. “Lone mothers in Russia: Soviet and Post-Soviet policy”(now an article needing access)
[v] Thistle, Jesse From the Ashes: my story of being Métis, homeless, and finding my way Simon, 2019, 39-42
[vi] McCarthy, Lauren A. “Transaction Costs: Prosecuting child trafficking for illegal adoption in Russia” (this article now needs access).
[vii] Gutman, David “Former WA Rep. Matt Shea, accused of domestic terrorism, working to secure adoptions for Ukrainian children in Poland” Seattle Times March 16, 2022 (it appears this article is no longer available)
Crook, Marion Thicker than Blood: Adoptive Parenting in the Modern World Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 53
Wellington, Rebecca Who is a Worthy Mother?: an intimate history of adoption University of Oklahoma Press, 2024
[viii] Gilliland, Haley Cohen A Flower Traveled In My Blood: the incredible true story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children Avid Reader Press, 2025
[ix] Nović, Sara Mother Tongue: a memoir Random House, 2026
[x] UN publication Child Adoption: Trends and Policies https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/policy/child-adoption.pdf
[xi] O’Dwyer, Jessica Mamalita: an adoption memoir. Seal Press, 2010, (bribery in adoption in Chapter 16, “The Fix”)
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